Jacob Thurman, creator of Embarcadero AppAnalytics, presented a session, “Leveraging AppAnalytics in FMX and VCL Apps From Concept to Completion to Deployment” in the Delphi and C++ tracks at the recent CodeRage X online technical conference (October 13-15, 2015). At the end of his presentation and demonstration, Jacob presented a list of AppAnalytics best practices with guidance during the different phases of software development, debugging, beta testing and deployment. The following are the practices Jacob talked about.
AppAnalytics Best Practices in a Proof-of-Concept and App Development
Record custom events for the major goals of the application
Record whether a user is successfully able to achieve the goal
Record a session exiting without achieving a goal.
Compare the successful vs. failed sessions to see if your application is on the right track.
Don’t track small details (yet)
Be careful not to record data from your own debugging sessions
You can do this by disabling the AppAnalytics component for yourself, or by filtering out your own IP address via the web interface.
AppAnalytics Best Practices During Beta Testing
REQUIRE beta testers to allow AppAnalytics data collection
Create a new AppID for each beta version you release
Expire your betas, so you’re not collecting data for an old beta version
Use custom events to finely track individual feature usage
Watch AppAnalytics to ensure that testing is happening in the right areas
If something isn’t being tested, encourage testers to work on that area
Watch AppAnalytics to see what operating system versions your app is being tested on, and seek out more testers to close the gaps
Collect unhandled exceptions, and look carefully and frequently at the data to see if there are errors you need to address
Be careful not to collect data from your own debugging sessions
AppAnalytics Best Practices in Deployment
Make data collection optional – allow users to opt-out.
Don’t collect too many events:
Every mouse click or keystroke
Every button click
Ask specific questions, and build your data collection to answer those questions
Continue to collect unhandled exceptions, and monitor the data frequently
The replay of Jacob’s CodeRage X session can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=949ukpaFUDQ&index=18&list=PLwUPJvR9mZHjFcs6XxCU14X3hxGk2shNF
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